Yahoo! Localworks: A Lead-Generation Service for Business Owners

Yahoo! may have killed a dozen of its products last month, but this all seems to be part of a “trimming-the-fat” strategy for the Sunnyvale-based Internet company. Also part of this strategy is the introduction of a new online local directory service that should give business owners something to look forward to.

This week, Yahoo! announced the new Yahoo! Localworks, a new product designed to push business listings content to over 40 directories across the Web and generate new leads for business owners. In an age when wrong local data is responsible for $10.3 billion worth of potential annual sales, Yahoo! Localworks improves online company profiles and lets business owners fix incorrect or incomplete listings on sites like Yahoo! Local (the company’s own online reviews aggregator) Yelp, Citysearch, MapQuest, SuperPages, MerchantCircle, and Bing.

“Online directory listings are one of the key ways that consumers find local products and services they need, but it’s a fragmented medium,” said Yahoo! Small Business Vice President Tom Byun. “It requires businesses to create and maintain listings with multiple companies to ensure they are listed everywhere.”

Yahoo! Localworks is a paid service, with an introductory price of almost $30 a month. It checks for errors in listings and displays status messages like “website not mentioned,” “does not have description,” or “no videos.” Apart from online listings management, it features advertising performance tracking, listings analytics, and the ability to promote coupons and time-sensitive special offers. Businesses can be listed in over 40 sites that receive a total of more than 150 million local searches every month – in desktop, mobile, and GPS navigation devices.

Are you a business owner looking to maximize your visibility on the Web? Once you’ve claimed and corrected your listings across today’s leading online directories and review aggregators, sign up for ReviewTrackers and effectively manage all your online reviews in one place. Contact us to request a demo or to learn more about discount pricing.

Kevin Kent

Kevin is the Director of Finance and Operations at ReviewTrackers. Every day he finds creative ways to solve business owners' problems and identifies key issues to help them achieve top results.

Discussion

Lou

July 24th, 2013

I just purchased 3 months of this service yesterday we will see how it works out for us. We have steady calls and business i am hoping that this will increase the call volume and internet ordering. 3 months is usually long enough to see if it will be effective.

ROSI Office Systems

ETN Painting

September 1st, 2013

Seemed like a good deal. As above poster alluded to; It is not only “like” yext, it is yext running it for them behind the scenes. At 90.00 every three months I hoped it might be a decent deal. The only problem Is one that wrecks the whole service. When you first sign up with yahoo local listing and then add this service Yahoo can take up to 10 weeks to approve your listing. While it is in the approval process you can not edit the listing. It’s funny they give you hints on how to make your profile more complete for a better listing and then when you click the link it pops up and states you can not make a change because you are in “review”. Isn’t the main selling point of the service the fact that you can change your listing and have it reflected across all search engines and listings? It’s almost comical that I paid 90.00 for 3 months and wont be able to use the core part of the service for 10 weeks when my profile will be “approved”

ETN Painting

September 6th, 2013

This is a follow up to the above post concerning the review of Yahoo Local Works. My particular case is now being handled by the BBB after a failure to get a refund. This is an excerpt from an email from Yahoo and another from their aq site for the program. It is also a copy of additional info submitted to BBB

Additional information from an email from Yahoo. Here they directly state what is the complete opposite of how the program is described on their own web site. The 1st is an excerpt from the email I received and the second is a description from their own site.
“However, any time you make any changes to the listing, it again goes through our Editorial process. Please allow 3-4 business days for review. If approved, your changes will be published across the Localworks directories within two (2) weeks. (notice the within 2 weeks)
Here is the excerpts from their site on FAQ’s for LocalWorks
“Can I make changes or add timely offers?”
“Yes. The ability to quickly update or change your listing means that you can include coupons or other time-sensitive special offers.”
“What if I have an event at my store; can I include that in listings for just 30 days?
“Yes. Special events are a great addition to your listing. With many sites publishing updates within a few hours, you can quickly create notices for your special events.”
Here notice the phrases “within hours” and “can include time sensitive material” ….These statements straight from Yahoo are in direct opposition to each other.

Yvette

Boston Business Coach

February 3rd, 2014

Here are a couple of critical updates for people considering Yahoo Local Listings (aka Localworks).

First, you should know that there is no way to distribute video content to the Yext-synchronized sites. Yahoo states in it’s marketing materials that you can upload video. But a call to tech support this morning revealed that this is a “future implementation” and “we have no identified date for the implementation.”

Second, one of the potentially powerful feature of Yext-synchronization is the ability to update specials / coupons to multiple sites. Yahoo’s database field for specials is not paired correctly to Yext’s coupon field. What does get synchronized is your “Company Slogan.” What is even worse is that the “Specials” data you enter get’s buried by Yahoo in your Yahoo listing and is incorrectly labelled by Yahoo as “Specialties.”

Interestingly enough no one has noticed these issues according to Yahoo tech support! Wow!

steve

kevin

July 3rd, 2014

This service will rip you off. I signed up and many of my listings were changed with misinformation. We cancelled the service over the phone but never received a confirmation. Then, were billed again a few months later… The robotic human representative would not consider refunding me right after billing even though service wasnt used during cycle. Stay away.

Andrew

September 8th, 2014

Do NOT sign up for Yahoo’s LOCALWORKS scam. It is run by Yext, which everybody hates and is a ripoff. I signed up for this and the salespeople lie to you. You sign up and nothing happens for months. Once you quit, all your listings will be even worse than before. When you complain, the reps all say they will help and then do nothing and don’t return calls. At one point, they told me to do all the work myself even though I was paying them! They had the nerve to tell me to contact the REAL directory service companies on NY own to make updates. So here you go, here is what you can do for free instead of paying Yahoo or Yext for nothing but headaches and heartaches. Go search Localeze (Amacai) and InfoUSA (aka ExpressUpdate) and spend some time doing the updating yourself on those sites and the individual sites that contain incorrect info. Sites like Yelp will require that you “claim” the listing which is good to do anyway to avoid someone else taking control of your info. Yelp may ask you to advertise. It can be very expensive. Avoid paying if you can and maybe use Google AdWords instead while educating yourself or hiring someone cheap on Fiverr.com or other sites to improve your search engine ranking and ads. Good luck everyone!

Jacob Kepler

October 2nd, 2014

I would agree with the other folks that this is a scam. I signed up a month ago and still haven’t received my service. I finally received confirmation on the phone from a customer service agent that it was a technical issue with Yahoo. The representative said this is a common issue with many other people. My advice would be to avoid this service.

Matt

Monique P.

October 28th, 2014

My father owns a small appliance repair business in Los Angeles County. Being that he is almost eighty years. old he is not to computer savvy. He hired three different SEO companies that did absolutely nothing but milk money from him on a monthly basis. I knew I had to put my foot down and make sure my father was not going to get scammed anymore by these con artists. I took it upon myself and went full speed ahead with search engine optimization for my father’s business and I quickly learned it’s a little work..lol. I will say that Yahoo is the worst search engine out there. It’s a F**king joke! I wanted to go back and edit a couple things and it wouldn’t let back in so I tried to call costumer service, waited on the phone for an hour and when they did finally pick up it was very clear that this voice was coming from overseas. They couldn’t even help me because they could not understand what I was saying, then they told me they were going to transfer me to someone who could help me but what they did was disconnect me on purpose. So now I’m anti-Yahoo . I would not recommend advertising on Yahoo Localworks. Save yourself a nightmare!

James Cordeiro

December 27th, 2014

I know all to well the experience your father had, Monique. I do SEO for many firms now, mostly legal firms and a few small shops. Some of the attorneys were paying $3,000+ per month in SEO, and the small shops were paying $300+/mth to get virtually nothing.

Don’t try to do SEO yourself. You’ll end up reading articles written by so called professionals, who don’t have any results themselves. That’s why they spent their time writing an article about doing SEO, because they aren’t spending any time actually performing optimization for clients. They read articles about doing SEO while writing an article about SEO. See… it’s a circle.

When hiring someone for SEO – simply get proof of previous work, and what they’ve done that “actually” shows results. Don’t let them show you someone else’s work, ensure you are actually seeing what they have done that proves they know how to optimize and garner business. The term ROI ( return on investment ). If they don’t have a single client that has earned a return on their investment for hiring their SEO as a recommendation or reference, don’t use them. Period. As for monthly expense – it should be in hours worked, not any continued maintenance. Also, each hour should be accounted for. What did they do in that hour, and WHY.

Patrick

Night Panther

March 16th, 2015

The $9.95/month option is the way to go with Yahoo Local, the $29.95 LocalWorks is a joke like anyone will tell you if they’ve bought it.

For under $10/month this is found money in the couch and you get almost all the benefits of the $30 service except the worthless updating across other review sites. We’ve had the $9.95 account for 6 1/2years and paid for itself ten times over easily and we have very small ticket services. If you have big ticket products/services/consulting this is a no brainer.

We tested as well and Yahoo gives higher rankings in Yahoo Local to people that pay as well. Pay the $9.95 and than go get yourself 3-4 reviews and you should rank in top 3 for your main industry/niche keywords.

JP

July 24th, 2015

So they really messed up on me and my listings! They have some sort of technical glitch and just keep telling me to wait a few days– for weeks. I finally got fed up and asked for my money back and they said that refunds aren’t an option.

HEY YAHOO! COME FIND ME AND MAKE THIS RIGHT! I HAVE ALREADY REPORTED YOU TO THE BBB!